Essays

Success U — Business Model Key Questions

About 110 Series A Entrepreneurs have formed into a collaborative through Montgomery & Associates Law Firm. A few of us industry experts are doing “faculty sessions” where we teach the essentials with the idea that quick, fast bursts of what really matters will help short-cut the learning curve and accelerate success. So a few weeks ago, I spoke at what is now called SuccessU (name is under construction) regarding Business Models, and the following are the video clips and notes from the talk. A PDF is available at the bottom of this entry.

Do they know they have the problem, and do they care? (The tech industry is wonderful at retrofitting imaginary problems to features that engineers wanted to build anyway.)

Seriously, do customers really care? Enough to spend money on a solution?

Does your product, need an ecosystem to, solve that problem?

Competitive Differentiation: “what are you doing that can’t be copied?”
This could be operational excellence, customer intimacy, innovation / rate of, ecosystem etc.

What is it?

What could be the leading indicators that the market is changing?

Customer / Market: “Who is your customer, not?”
Who, specifically, is the customer for this product? (Note: “young people” does not count as a target market, neither does “professionals.” Be specific about their lives and needs.)